The rule of empires : those who built them, those who endured them, and why they always fall (64 page)

a problem in Nairobi from its earliest days, and in the 1920s African

burglars had learned to break open safes, avoid leaving fi ngerprints,

and escape in automobiles.

The municipal authorities therefore tried frantically to stamp out

unauthorized African settlements and pulled down an average of

thirty to forty illegal dwellings each week. But by the early 1920s, they

had to accept the African “locations” of Pumwani and Kariokor (on

the site of the old Carrier Corps depot) as permanent neighborhoods.

328 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

They could also do nothing about Kibera, a location that began as

a settlement of discharged Sudanese veterans of the King’s African

Rifl es. This did not, however, mean that they provided these African

settlements with water, sewage, or other basic amenities.

The Nairobi municipal council justifi ed this policy of malignant

neglect on the grounds that Africans were temporary labor migrants

who would eventually return to homes and families in the reserves.

Apart from a small percentage of nurses and nannies, the logic of

the colour bar also dictated that urban Africans were to be almost

exclusively male. This freed employers from having to pay the higher

wages needed to support a family in the city and allowed them to

house their workers in simple barracks. The municipal authorities

never could enforce these provisions, but their single-sex residence

policies meant that the ratio of men to women in Nairobi was approximately eight to one by the end of the 1930s. The humanitarian lobby

worried that this imbalance would lead to crime and vice, but more

pragmatic government offi cials believed that a small number of prostitutes could tend to the migrants’ needs.

The relatively few young African women who settled in Nairobi endured the indignities of urban imperial life because the cities

provided an escape from the reserves, where the imperial regime

rewarded the chiefs by backing their authority over tribeswomen.

Some female migrants did work as prostitutes, but others provided

rooms, home-brewed alcohol, and other basic domestic services.

Although these arrangements made the government’s gendered

labor policies more bearable, the end result was a surge in rootless

young people who swelled Nairobi’s informal economy by the end

of the interwar era. Worried that this “urban crowd” would follow political agitators like Harry Thuku, the municipal authorities

fi nally admitted the necessity of allowing Africans to bring their

families to the city.

The imperial regime’s inability to keep the settled areas “white”

exposed its inherent weakness. Illegal urban migration was just one

of many strategies that Africans of all walks of life used to lessen the

weight of the new imperialism. Lacking the means to resist openly,

local communities took advantage of the Kenyan government’s inability to govern them directly. A profusion of labor unrest and strikes

in the late 1930s hinted at the potential of collective action, but in

the interwar era vagrancy, trespassing, cattle rustling, prostitution,

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Kenya 329

moonshining, and burglary were the most sensible and effective survival strategies for common people.

This was in contrast to the small handful of converts and mission

school graduates whose mastery of western culture and English literacy qualifi ed them for relatively lucrative careers as teachers, clerks,

and interpreters. Free from the need to trespass in foreign reserves

or live by their wits in the informal urban economy, they used the

legitimizing ideologies of the new imperialism to attack the racist

underpinnings of the Kenyan state. In founding their independent

churches and schools, they sought to break the link between Christianity, western culture, and imperial authority by demonstrating that

they too were a civilized people. The independent church movement

fi rst took hold among the Luo and Luhya communities before World

War I and then spread to the Kikuyu reserves in the interwar period.

Beginning with debates over the translation and interpretation of the

Bible, independency rapidly became a moral and political force. Ultimately, the converts imagined a new African Christian society freed

from the condescension of the missions and the political dominance

of the settlers, but in the short term they wanted the freedom to conduct their own baptisms, marriages, and other religious rituals.

The Kikuyu independents in particular rejected Anglican and Presbyterian attacks on their culture and established a series of breakaway

churches in the early 1920s. The confrontation came to a head in 1929

over the missionaries’ insistence that their converts renounce female

circumcision. Galvanized by Jomo Kenyatta’s eloquent defense (if

not reinterpretation) of Kikuyu tradition, large numbers of Kikuyu

deserted the missions for these new churches. Many converts

returned in time, but the independent churches remained viable. In

the mid-1930s, church elders brought in an archbishop of the African

Orthodox Church in South Africa named Daniel William Alexander

to ordain their clergymen. The Kenyan police’s Criminal Investigation Division kept the “coloured” Archbishop under surveillance, and

the missions refused to recognize his baptisms and ordinations.

Despite these obstacles, Alexander’s work legitimized the Kikuyu

independent churches and, more important, their schools. In many

ways, African demands for formal education lay at the root of the

independence movement. At a time when schooling offered the best

chance to escape the imperial regime’s unyielding labor demands, African parents were immensely frustrated that the Kenyan government

330 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

provided school spaces for only about thirty thousand of their children at the close of World War I.48 This meant that just over 1 percent

of the nearly three million Kenyan Africans had access to the “civilizing” western education that was a central ideological prop of the new

imperialism. Even worse, there were only several hundred secondary

school places for Africans.

This explains the school building boom in the Kikuyu reserves

in the years before the Second World War. In 1936, the Education

Department estimated that the independent institutions had enrollments of over fi ve thousand students. Kenyan offi cials would have

preferred to close them down, but they lacked the legal authority.

While they probably could have an invented an excuse to do so, it

would have been diffi cult to explain to the humanitarian lobby why

teaching English, Christianity, and western values constituted an

illegal act. At a time when modern communication gave the metropolitan government and general public the means to exercise unprecedented oversight over the wider empire, the imperial authorities had

to appear to make good on their legitimizing rhetoric by giving their

subjects at least some access to western culture and education.

The Kenyan government did not grasp the potential power of

independence because its district offi cers still believed most Africans

thought tribally and locally. The imperial authorities did not understand that discriminatory and oppressive land and labor policies and

the inherent racism of the colour bar inspired Africans to imagine a

larger, potentially violent, collective response to the imperial regime.

In 1938, Jomo Kenyatta, the future president of Kenya, issued the

prophetic warning that his fellow subjects were beginning to realize

that it would take united action, if not force, to regain their freedom.

Appropriating the imperial terminology of “the African,” he cautioned that “he realises that he might fi ght unceasingly for his own

complete emancipation; for without this he is doomed to remain the

prey of rival imperialisms, which in every successive year will drive

their fangs more deeply into his vitality and strength.”49

Confi dent in their power, neither the metropolitan British government nor the Kenyan imperial regime paid much attention to

Kenyatta’s threat. Even as war with Germany loomed, most Britons

still assumed that the empire would last for centuries. As Britain

recovered from the depression, the African territories seemed particularly secure. Brushing aside the economic failures of the interwar

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Kenya 331

era, the imperial lobby still promised to provide protected markets,

new frontiers for settlement, and military manpower for the coming

war. While some contemporary imperial sympathizers argue that the

Colonial Offi ce developed plans to train subject peoples for self-rule

in the late 1930s, no one in offi cial or unoffi cial imperial circles ever

really imagined dismantling the empire at this point.

British offi cials optimistically believed that they could fi x the

imperial system to make it more acceptable to their subjects. On this

score they were willing to grant non-Europeans a measure of selfgovernment so long as they remained within the overall umbrella of

the empire. In India, the fi rst elections under the new Government of

India Act gave the Indian National Congress control of India’s provinces and most of its central administration in 1937. But loosening

their hold on the Raj only made the British government more committed to retaining the rest of the empire. In 1938, the Colonial Offi ce

launched an ambitious new development initiative that promised to

make good on the imperial lobby’s grand promises about the mutual

benefi ts of empire building. Its Colonial Development and Welfare

Act of 1940 earmarked fi ve million pounds per year for the development of “any colony or the welfare of its people.” To a large degree,

this was an answer to critics who equated the most oppressive and

racist aspects of the new imperialism with Nazi fascism.

The realities of the Second World War postponed these development initiatives and forced Britain to instead make heavy demands

on the empire. The wartime government implemented uncompromising extractive policies that wrung food, raw materials, manpower,

and capital out of its remaining imperial territories around the world.

Britain reasserted direct control over the Raj after the Indian National

Congress withdrew from the government to protest its unilateral

decision to draw India into the war with Germany. Putting aside the

power-sharing compromises of the 1930s, British offi cials committed

more than two million Indian men and 286.5 million pounds’ worth

of Indian goods to the imperial war effort and obligated the Raj to pay

the operating costs of Indian Army units serving abroad. Common

Indians paid the price for these contributions in the form of heavy

manpower demands, higher taxes, and widespread food shortages.

By comparison, the war was a boon to the Kenyan settlers. Japanese

conquests in the Far East eliminated much of their competition and

the increased global demand for food and raw materials opened new

332 THE RULE OF EMPIRES

markets and drove up prices. In 1941, Kenya and the other East African territories assumed primary responsibility for supplying British

forces during the North African campaign. Never before had Kenya’s

exports been so profi table, but these factors alone did not account

for the European community’s sudden prosperity. African farmers

were still much better equipped to produce for the global market,

and the settlers remained hamstrung by ineffi ciency and high labor

and transport costs. Wartime emergency measures made the Colonial Offi ce much less likely to intervene to protect African interests,

which gave the Kenyan government the opportunity to expand subsidies and price supports for European agriculture. Settler leaders also

maneuvered Kenyan offi cials into buying their maize at nearly twice

the African rate on the grounds that peasant farmers had lower production costs and should be discouraged from overplanting to protect

the soil. In practice, speculators bought African maize for resale at the

higher European rate and manipulated mandatory livestock auctions

in the reserves to do the same thing with African cattle.

The imperial special interests also secured cheap African labor by

convincing the government to classify their enterprises as “essential

undertakings.” While this designation was supposed to apply only to

strategically important sectors of the economy, the Kenya authorities

broadened its defi nition to include the production of tea, coffee, and

virtually anything else that could grow in the white highlands. The

essential undertakings legislation also allowed the settlers to requisition conscripted civilian laborers. Pressure from metropolitan Britain

forced the Kenyan government to revise these rules in 1943 to exclude

some of the most embarrassing abuses, but not before the settlers

made windfall profi ts. Conversely, although some African farmers

also benefi ted from rising wartime prices, in 1943 food exports and a

labor shortage brought on by civil conscription and military recruiting caused widespread famine in many reserves.

Britain paid a political price for asking so much of its subjects during the war. Although Winston Churchill insisted that the 1941 Atlantic Charter, which affi rmed that all peoples had the right of national